In Genesis 3, it is not the fruit itself that is objectively bad, as is commonly believed, but it is instead how Adam and Eve use that fruit. Instead of waiting until they have developed the necessary virtues needed to possess the knowledge it gives, they eat the fruit of their own accord. Therefore, they have taken something good and have and disfigured it by using the knowledge of good and evil purely for their own gain. Through this action, Adam and Eve take something god-like, namely the knowledge of good and evil, and corrupt it with by mixing it with something human, namely their desire to benefit only themselves.
This theme of the mixing of the divine and human, leading to the corruption of each, is seen again in the lead up to account of Noah and the flood. In Genesis 6, the sons of God are described as taking the daughters of men, whom they see as fair, to be their wives. Kass asserts that through these marriages, the son of God, or the god-like, and the daughters of men, or humans, corrupt each other. The men are taken in by the outward beauty of the women but fail to separate that beauty from what is morally good, and they pay no attention to moral goodness when choosing a wife. Beauty and marriage, which by themselves are not bad things, are quickly corrupted through their misuse. Through this description of what brought about the Great Flood, a parallel can be drawn back to Genesis 3. The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, by itself, was a good thing, but was corrupted by the humans’ use of it. In both stories, humans take a morally and divinely good and, through their choices and use of the thing, manage to corrupt it into something bad.
The idea that it is again humans corrupting each other was a theme that I actually missed, but makes total sense thematically when compared to the Sin of Eden, and how it was Eve that corrupted Adam(or at least gave him the apple to eat). Again, in a way, humans are being corrupted again by each other.
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I like the parallel you drew between the mixing of both bad and good in both accounts. I think that speaks to the nature of humanity itself, especially today, but also since the beginning of time. Human nature is a mixture of good — God-given gifts bestowed upon us in the Garden, and bad — the sins we commit despite these gifts.
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Yes I completely see your point about humans taking God’s gift to them and using it to their own benefit to advance themselves independent to God’s will and divine plan for them. I really liked your intertwining of ideas of marriage of family and the explanation of how daughters of men corrupt each other. This can be further seen through the incorporation of language and self-developed cities along the course of the Bible during this very same time period of Noah. A question I always ask myself when recounting on Genesis and the words of Krass is whether or not the first humans intentionally meant to go against God’s initial word and advance themselves or can we really blame them for using their own intelligence for their own benefit?
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Catherine, I agree with what you are saying about men’s ability to grab something which is by itself not good and corrupting it. However, I feel you are forgetting an essential point made by Kass, which states that the problem with men was not to appreciate external beauty, but rather the exclusive desire to possess that beauty. The men would then objectify the women and take them as possessions. In this case, we have another case of corruption of something good.
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